'An Evening with Ed Asner' in Stratford

Joe Meyers

Published 11:05 am, Monday, December 31, 2012

Veteran actor Ed Asner will talk about his long career and the season he spent at the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford at "An Evening with Ed Asner" in Stratford on Jan. 8.
Photo: Contributed Photo

Veteran actor Ed Asner will talk about his long career and the...

Ed Asner played Bardolph in "Merrry Wives of Windsor" during the 1959 season at the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford. The actor will be returning to Stratford on Jan. 8 for a fundraiser "An Evening with Ed Asner."
Photo: Contributed Photo

It was a halcyon era in which such stars as Katharine Hepburn and Alfred Drake played to packed houses in productions of "Much Ado About Nothing" and "The Merchant of Venice."

Supporting the stars in Stratford in the 1950s and '60s was a rotating company of character actors and young performers who hadn't yet made their mark in the theater, but who would rise, in subsequent years, like Asner -- Nancy Marchand, Fritz Weaver, Sada Thompson, Will Geer and Barbara Barrie, among them.

Asner is returning to Stratford on Tuesday, Jan. 8, to talk about the glory days of the town's Shakespeare theater and the rest of his career.

"It was a helluva good time ... a wonderful time," Asner said in a recent interview between the matinee and evening performances of his Broadway show, "Grace," in which he co-stars with Paul Rudd and Michael Shannon.

"I was awed by the opulence that I was enveloped in at that point," the actor said of the prodigiously well-funded theater that was then under the artistic leadership of John Houseman.

"I had hopes for better roles, but I had never had costumes like that before -- new leather boots, tights that fit me," he said.

Asner laughed when I mentioned that Houseman had described him as "a sturdy young actor" in his memoir, "Final Dress," about the four years that Houseman ran the theater.

"I was very sturdy," the actor said, adding that the company was always a bit in awe of Houseman -- "this fabled individual" who had run the Mercury Theatre with Orson Welles in the 1930s and then produced films, including "Lust for Life," before he would go on to become the Oscar-winning star of "The Paper Chase."

Asner was a New York stage actor in the 1950s whose gigs included the now-legendary off-Broadway production of "The Threepenny Opera," starring Lotte Lenya and a bunch of young unknowns, including Jerry Orbach and Beatrice Arthur.

The pay in Stratford was "not that much," Asner recalled, but the guarantee of a full season's work with top-flight stage performers was a great opportunity at that point in his career.

The actor said he still remembers working with and learning from performers like Geer, Morris Carnovsky and Hiram Sherman (the latter actor, known as "Chubby," is largely forgotten now, but won raves from critics and many awards throughout his long stage career). "It was just an awesome experience," he said.

More than 50 years later, Asner could still recall the fun he had with his fellow actors in "Merry Wives of Windsor" in Stratford.

"I had four lines, but I got myself this big rubber nose and for kicks every time I faced upstage -- looking at Chubby and Carnovsky -- I would suck in my breath and it would cave in. I liked giving them a laugh," Asner said of the antics that went unseen by the audience, but bonded the company together.

The choreographer George Balanchine worked on one of the shows in 1959, but Asner wasn't involved in any of the dance numbers and never met the great man.

"The way I moved generally that was probably a good thing," he joked.

Asner still has friends in the area and happily said "yes" when he was asked to launch a series of fund-raising evenings with "alumni" of the Shakespeare theater.

The event dovetailed perfectly with the 83-year-old actor's return to Broadway for the first time in more than 20 years.

"It has been delicious," he said of his well-received run in "Grace."

"The last time I was here was in 1989 and they kicked the crap out of us," Asner added of the less-than-sensational notices for the revival of "Born Yesterday" that featured him and Madeline Kahn.

Asner is looking forward to returning to his old Shakespeare stomping grounds two days after "Grace" ends its limited run on Sunday, Jan. 6.

"I'm doing it for old times sake, if not new times," he said of his support for a revival of the fabled venue. "I'm happy to contribute to that in any way that I can."